Forgotten Magazine: The JDM Review

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, John D. MacDonald was one of the bestselling writers around.  Then he died, and it was almost as if he'd never existed.  Plenty of old-timers like me remembered him and still considered him a favorite writer, but not so many younger people seemed to connect.

He was so popular with me that around 1966 or so, I started collecting the first printings of all his paperbacks.  In those days, I could still find the early ones in pretty good condition, though some of them weren't so easy.  It took a while for me to find Weep for Me, for example, but I eventually found nice copies of both printings.  As a grad student at The University of Texas at Austin, I won second prize in the student book collecting contest for my collection.  

At about the same time, I read in the book review section of the New York Times about a fanzine called The JDM Bibliophile, published by Len and June Moffatt.  I sent off for a subscription, and thus was plunged into mystery fandom, a pond I'm still swimming in.  All my copies of the JDMB, as it was affectionately known, are now in the Texas A&M library if they haven't disposed of them. 

Much later, another publication devoted to JDM appeared, and that's the one pictured here.  Naturally I subscribed to that one, too.  I can't remember how many issues there were, but I suppose that any others I had are at A&M.  This one slipped by me when I packed things to take there.  It's a more professionally printed job than JDMB (a mimeographed zine), but this first issue is a slim one.  It has some good material, however, including several newspaper columns written by JDM.  There's also a substantial contribution by Walter and Jean Shine, JDM scholars of the first rank.

I'm glad I happened across this magazine.  It was fun to revisit it and to remember the days when JDM was a name to be reckoned with in the crime fiction field.